HOW BITCOIN FITS IVAN ILLICH'S VISION FOR THE FUTURE




The work of Ivan Illich — ronin of the Catholic Church, “errant pilgrim,” and subtle, surprising and far-ranging social theorist — is experiencing a renaissance among many who worry that technology poses corrosive threats to human culture and well-being. A trenchant and unique critic of the Catholic Church in which he came up, Illich went on to critique many modern institutions, whose failures he saw as reflective of the failures of the Church.To get more news about STORJ, you can visit wikibit.com official website.
　　Illich’s unique critiques of “industrial institutions” throw new light on our modern monetary system, and bitcoin’s place within it. In this essay, I’d like to introduce how Illich thought about institutions and TOOLS, apply that lens to our present-day monetary system, and finally, consider Bitcoin as an alternative.
　　Across a body of thematically linked work, Illich argued that our modern societies increasingly confuse large-scale and bureaucratic “institutions,” like those of “schooling” and “medicine,” with the goals they nominally arose to combat. In so doing, we commodify core aspects of our once-social being, and we cede individual and communal capacity to vast institutions with increasingly “radical monopolies” over the services they render and goals they claim to serve.
　　This consolidation into “industrial institutions” with “radical monopolies” over the services they offered disempowered both communities and individuals. This combined disempowerment and monopolization inevitably led to counterproductive institutions, which lost sight of, and began to undermine, their stated aims.
　　Schooling, the subject of Illich’s “Deschooling Society,” provides an example. Illich argued that “schooling” had come to be confused with “learning.” Learning was historically an individualized and active process, specific to each person’s needs and context — lifelong, communal, curiosity-driven and unconstrained. One learns naturally and without much explicit instruction: from one’s community, work, role models or autonomous engagement with the world.
　　This learning is inherently active, tailored, compelling and “vernacular,” or naturally absorbed: Think of language.
　　Schooling is fundamentally different. Once a component of broader learning, schooling supplanted other forms of learning. The global dominance of modern schooling — driven by well-meaning activists (and the Prussian army) and supported by government funding and the global export of an American “industrial” vision — replaced natural learning with institutional learning.
　　In this new model, Illich argued, time spent “in seat” at an institutionally accredited school — a metric of consumption of an institutional good — became the measure of “learning” achieved. This change elevated credentialism, and it made the open-ended, self-driven and practical model of learning vocationally impractical in competition with the institutional and consumerist one. Over time, this destroyed broader learning.
　　The new institutional schooling model was based on discrete units of imposed and uniform training consumed in an increasingly authoritarian setting. The very structure of this mode of education is antithetical to free thought, skepticism, risk-taking and creativity. Units of this product consumed predominantly reflect willingness and capacity to be “excellent sheep,” along with privileged institutional access.
Conformity to authority is central to the model and necessary for continued consumption. A public school teacher, Illich pointed out, has become a triplicate authority of moral, epistemic and civic judgment — a primary arbiter of one’s inherent and societal value, and key to the door of the modern economy. As Illich put it, “The distinctions between morality, legality, and personal worth are blurred and eventually eliminated. Each transgression is made to be felt as a multiple offense.”
　　As growing numbers of “students” and “teachers” are minted in this ecosystem of authority, knowledge itself becomes institutionalized and confused with increasingly gated “expertise.”
　　Institutionalization feeds on its own failure. As this process makes schooling prerequisite to social access, it also transforms schooling into the monomaniacal target of reform. Well-meaning reformers dive in to “SOLVE” educational gatekeeping, not by questioning educational gatekeeping or encouraging alternatives, but by attempting to shove more individuals through the gate. Simply infeasible levels of equality of “schooling” (not learning) are demanded for larger and larger numbers of people throughout the globe.
　　As institutional schooling metastasizes, it drives down quality (and equality) and exacerbates gatekeeping far faster than it improves relevant “learning.” Simultaneously, it absorbs a larger and larger share of society’s resources. It comes to strangle and replace — to radically monopolize — all other forms of learning. Along the way, this educational behemoth shapes cultures and economies in its image, replacing the custom, communal solutions which flourished with massive, restrictive, uniform and grossly unequal and nonfunctional bureaucracies.